San Leandro is starting monthly community gatherings at its eye-catching 55-foot-tall “Truth Is Beauty” sculpture on Thursday.

“Truth Thursdays” will feature live entertainment, recreational games, Off the Grid food trucks, beer from local brewers and wine.

The recurring gatherings will take place from 5 to 9 p.m. the fourth Thursday of the month at the 55-foot statue at the San Leandro Tech Campus plaza, 1600 Alvarado St. The plaza is west of the San Leandro BART station.

The gatherings are hosted by the San Leandro Improvement Association in partnership with Westlake Urban and OSI Software.

“We wanted to create an event to connect our community together and provide them with a safe and fun place to go to after work and spend time with their co-workers, friends and family,” Gordon Galvan, president of the San Leandro Improvement Association, said in a statement.

“We invite all of San Leandro, BART commuters, Bay Area residents and visitors to come and unwind after a long day with some good food, drink and music under ‘Truth Is Beauty,’ ” he said.

Artist Marco Cochrane’s statue was installed in 2016 at the tech campus. The sculpture, first showcased at the 2013 Burning Man festival, is of a nude woman standing on her toes, legs crossed. Her body is tilted backward and her arms are stretched upward toward the sky.

“Their effort to create a women-friendly tech center is, to me, very important — without women, we’re not going to make it, and I mean that on the most profound level, because if it’s just men working at it, we’re just going to cause the same types of problems, ” the artist said in a 2016 interview.

It weighs 13,000 pounds, with 20,000 feet of steel rod tubing covered with 2,000 square feet of stainless steel mesh. It has 2,500 LED lights and is visible from the BART station.

At the base of the sculpture is the phrase, “What would the world be like if women were safe?”

“When you look at the sculpture, you think, ‘She’s beautiful,’ ‘She’s huge,’ ‘It’s structurally amazing,’ and all of that stuff, so it’s very attractive, but when you come up to it, you see this question — all of those attributes that make you want to come up and see it make her unsafe in this world, ” Cochrane said.

“Her body language is safe, but it’s talking about a solution, which is to really look at this; when we don’t look at things like rape, we don’t do anything about it, ” he said.

Email submissions to Kathy Bennett at kbennett@bayareanewsgroup.com. Congressional App Challenge continues this fall Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, is hosting the third annual Congressional App Challenge (CAC) for California’s 11th District, an app coding competition for U.S. high school students. Students who live or attend school in the district are invited to create and submit their own software application for mobile,...